Donald Brotz 🇺🇸

Husband, Father, Northwestern Basketball, Baseball Dad

[Five-Star Basketball @5starbasketball]

Summer of 1990

Before mixtapes.
Before social media.
Before NIL.

Two sets of stations each day in Honesdale and Robert Morris.

Tag someone who was there.

12 photos from the archives 🧵👇

[Greg Price @greg_price11]

BESSENT: "Sen. Wyden has slandered the Treasury building to cover up his son having an investment with Jeffrey Epstein."

WYDEN: "Nobody is interested in the rambling of a capo in the most corrupt regime in American history."

BESSENT: "Your son's largest investment position was Rick's Cabaret. Did your son and Epstein talk about poll dancing?

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The man calling out Ferrari over its new electric car is the same man who built modern Ferrari from the wreckage of 1991. Luca di Montezemolo joined the company in 1973, at age 26, as Enzo Ferrari's personal assistant. A year later, he was running the entire F1 team.

In his late 20s, that team won world driver titles with Austrian racer Niki Lauda in 1975 and 1977. He then moved up through Fiat, the Italian car giant that owns Ferrari, and even ran Italy's 1990 World Cup organizing committee.

By 1991, Ferrari was in trouble. Enzo had died three years earlier. Fiat had pushed yearly production to around 4,500 cars, and Ferraris were sitting unsold in showrooms. The F1 team was losing. By the early 1990s, magazine tests were showing Honda's mid-range NSX out-handling the Ferrari 348 on track. So Gianni Agnelli, the billionaire who ran Fiat, called Montezemolo back to fix it.

He moved fast. First he cut production by almost half, so Ferraris would feel rare again. Then he hired what fans still call the dream team: Jean Todt as team boss, Ross Brawn writing race strategy, and a young German driver named Michael Schumacher pulled away from a rival team in 1996.

The numbers from the run that followed still look unreal on paper. Between 1999 and 2004, Ferrari won six straight team championships, and Schumacher won five driver titles in a row. The team took more than two-thirds of every race held in that period. Schumacher retired with 91 career wins, 72 of them in a red Ferrari, still second only to Lewis Hamilton on the all-time list.

The road car business ran on one rule: keep them scarce. Production stayed near 7,000 cars a year even as demand kept climbing. Some buyers waited 15 years to get one. Ferrari built specific models designed to become legends, the Enzo, the 599 GTB, the LaFerrari hybrid hypercar. Across his 23 years in charge, the company's revenue grew about tenfold and sales more than tripled.

In 2014, the new Fiat boss Sergio Marchionne wanted to sell more cars. Montezemolo wanted to keep them rare. Marchionne won the argument, and Montezemolo was pushed out in October. A year later, Ferrari went public on the New York Stock Exchange at $52 a share. Today the stock trades near $350, and the company is worth close to $60 billion, an outcome that arguably proves both men right.

The Ferrari Luce launched Monday. It is a $640,000 four-door family car, fully electric, designed with Jony Ive (the man behind the iPhone) and his studio LoveFrom. Within hours of the reveal, Ferrari's Milan shares dropped about 8 percent. The next day, speaking at a business conference in Rome, Montezemolo said Ferrari was risking "the destruction of a myth" and asked for the Prancing Horse to be taken off the car. He should know what destroying the Ferrari myth looks like. He built that myth himself.

[Documenting Saylor @saylordocs]

Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, has a $10 plaque behind his desk that reads: "If we're all going to eat, someone has to sell."

Of all the things this man could surround himself with, he chose a cheap plaque with a blunt truth about business.

"You're always selling. You're selling to candidates. You're selling to vendors, you're selling to counterparties, you're selling to customers."

And if you're always selling, you know what you're going to hear a lot of?

"No."

Griffin doesn't sugarcoat it. He tells two stories that illustrate just how brutal rejection can be.

1994 was a rough year, with Citadel losing ~4% of its capital. Griffin flew to Switzerland for a crucial lunch meeting, sat down, and his guest arrived only to say:

"Oh, I thought you were John Griffin from Fen Church. I got to go."

His lunch date got up and left the table.

Later that afternoon, a Swiss banker spent 45 minutes with him in a beautiful office, smoking a cigar, before closing with:

"Such a pity that such a bright young man picked the wrong career."

Two rejections in one day for the founder of one of the most successful hedge funds in history — and his takeaway was simply this:

"You just have to tolerate. You're going to hear no a lot, but you need to become accustomed to having to market your ideas and market what you represent and what you stand for."

Absorbing rejection and continuing anyway is the actual skill, whether you're hiring, raising capital, or winning customers.

Most people avoid selling because they're afraid of no. The ones who build great things have learned to expect it.

[Jeff Orr @JeffO773]

Ken Griffin: What did it feel like in Chicago with JB Pritzker as governor? It felt like a salmon swimming upstream to die.

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

@barrylongii

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

@DanWolken @YahooSports Best team you can pay for. Not building a program, not building character. Real life hits these kids hard after college.

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

@Zigmanfreud Easter Sunday afternoon game, who really was watching

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

Luckily nobody watched a afternoon Easter Sunday game.

[John @iam_johnw]

dawn staley wearing no South Carolina clothing and wearing balenciaga while getting blown out is diabolical lmao

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

Federal law comes above any state laws.

[Block Club Chicago @BlockClubCHI]

The feds broke state law by targeting people near Chicago courts, officials with the Cook County Public Defender’s Office said. https://t.co/9oAJ98aHA3

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

205?😂😂😂😂

[Dov Kleiman @NFL_DovKleiman]

Scary: Browns superstar QB Shedeur Sanders benching 205 pounds with EASE.

Shedeur has put on a serious amount of muscle this offseason.

Many people don’t realize how hard this is.

🤯🤯🤯

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

Won’t work in the NBA, another under sized forward from Duke. Dariq Whitehead, Wendell Moore, Wendell Carter, Semi Ojeleye, Justine Winslow, Carlos Boozer, Elton Brand. Stop drafting Duke small forwards.

[Tim Brando @TimBrando]

So Boozer can just run over anyone? I mean how’s that not a charge?? Horrible, inconsistent officiating throughout this years Tournament. Just pitiful!

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

Rocky Top! Real Basketball

[Caleb Noe @CalebNoeTV]

The season ends for Miami (OH), with a 78-56 loss to Tennessee.

It's a season that will forever be remembered in Oxford, and might be just a building block for the future of that program.

Man, what a fun ride it's been!

[Flushing It @flushingitgolf]

Dean Burmester just played the “Lion’s Den” hole while wearing a South Africa shirt in front of his home fans. As soon as he hit it he knew it was good and walked straight after it with his hands up.

He’s vibing out there 🇿🇦

https://t.co/FhAkCXyyLc

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

Stop listening to this man, he’s destroying California

[Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @christopherrufo]

Here's Gavin Newsom at the groundbreaking ceremony for the "butterfly bridge," lying to the public about how much the project would cost and making fun of Caltrans for constantly disappointing voters.

He knows his own government is incompetent—and he think it's funny.

[College Basketball Content @CBBcontent]

- Stayed at the same school 4 years
- Went from averaging 2 PPG as a freshman to 22 PPG as a senior
- 25 20+ point games this year

A rarity in college basketball nowadays, legend

[J @JayTC53]

Americas biggest failures all in one photo.

[Donald Brotz 🇺🇸 @dtbrotz]

@SoveyX @BenStiller Actors are idiots, let’s go Kyrgios!!

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

This is the opposite of the halftime show

[USA Hockey @usahockey]

THE GOAL HEARD AROUND THE WORLD 🥇🥇 #WINTEROLYMPICS